Barakat was Mohammad’s husband; Abu-Salha was her sister, the school said.

Barakat was a second-year student at the UNC School of Dentistry, who was raising money on a fundraising site to provide dental care to Syrian refugees in Turkey.

He had been married for just over a month to Yusor Mohammad, who was planning to begin her dental studies at UNC in the fall, according to the school.

Abu-Salha was a student at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

All three had been shot in the head

This is obviously a tragedy. Aside from that, it will be fascinating to see if the President is able to identify the religion of the victims and why they were murdered. I doubt this one will be chalked up to randomness. (And we don’t know if the shooter is a Tea Party member, a neo-Nazi or just mentally ill, but I bet the press assumes that he is somehow a conservative, Tea Party member, because they have to have something that feels like balance in their feeble minds).

suspected radical atheist is in police custody after allegedly murdering three young Muslims in the North Carolina college town of Chapel Hill, media reports indicate.

According to the British newspaper Independent, the three Muslims, who were all from the same family, were in their home when a 46-year-old man identified by police as Craig Stephen Hicks gunned them down.

If he’s not conservative, this won’t get much coverage. He’ll be mentally ill.

Rarely do we get to enjoy a story that covers ethical violations, democrats, green energy and the stupidity of the MSM all in one place. Oregon will do that for you, and that’s why we love it so much here.

“I’m not going to consider resigning,” said Gov. John Kitzhaber at a disastrous press conference held Friday following revelations about the apparently borderless world of public policy and private gain in which he and fiancée Cylvia Hayes exist. “I was elected by the people of this state to do a job, and I intend to do it.”

No doubt, the governor does intend to do the job Oregonians gave him, which, simply put, is to pursue the interests of his constituents. That intention, however, is no match for an ugly reality of his own making, whose sordid elements keep surfacing with dispiriting regularity, most recently this week thanks to the work of Nick Budnick and Laura Gunderson of The Oregonian/OregonLive. Two people involved in Kitzhaber’s 2010 campaign helped Hayes find paid work with groups interested in Oregon policy, Budnick and Gunderson reported. Both have landed in Kitzhaber’s administration.

More ugliness may surface, but it should be clear by now to Kitzhaber that his credibility has evaporated to such a degree that he can no longer serve effectively as governor. If he wants to serve his constituents he should resign.

To recite every reported instance in which Hayes, ostensibly under Kitzhaber’s watchful eye, has used public resources, including public employee time and her “first lady” title, in pursuit of professional gain would require far more space than we have here and, besides, repeat what most readers already know. Suffice it to say there’s a pattern, and the person who bears the responsibility for allowing it to form and persist is Kitzhaber, who should know better. After all, as he pointed out during Friday’s press conference, he’s been serving in public office on and off since the 1970s.

Consider, instead, what Oregonians have learned during only the last couple of weeks. First, Hayes received a combined $118,000 in 2011 and 2012 through the Washington, D.C.-based Clean Economy Development Center even as she served as an unpaid energy adviser to Kitzhaber. This income is not fully accounted for on tax forms Hayes provided to The Oregonian/OregonLive. Neither has the governor fully accounted for the money in ethics filings.

A big chunk of Hayes’ fellowship money, $75,000, came from the San Francisco-based Energy Foundation, a nonprofit that funds clean-energy initiatives such as the low carbon fuel standard. Implementing a low carbon fuel standard is a priority for both Kitzhaber and Democratic leaders in the Legislature. The session’s first public hearing on a bill to that end happened on Monday.

How did Hayes end up with a fellowship funded by an organization with an interest in clean-energy policy in Oregon? A Kitzhaber campaign adviser, Dan Carol, helped arrange the funding following Kitzhaber’s election in 2010, Budnick and Gunderson reported. Carol subsequently landed a position within the Kitzhaber administration. That position, Willamette Week has reported, pays more than $165,000, making Carol Kitzhaber’s highest-paid aide.

Who knew following the trail of “clean energy” money could make you feel so dirty?

Another campaign adviser, Greg Wolf, helped land Hayes a position with the Rural Development Initiatives. The nonprofit, Budnick and Gunderson reported, wanted Hayes to help raise money for a clean economy project – including tens of thousands for which Kitzhaber’s support was needed. Wolf, like Carol, later secured a position in Kitzhaber’s administration.

Is it any wonder Kitzhaber now finds himself stranded in an ethical swamp? To understand the full extent of his predicament, consider his inability to answer one simple question during his press conference Friday: Is Hayes a member of your household? He answered this question in the affirmative on multiple occasions in ethics filings. But on Friday, following the discovery of apparently unreported fellowship income, he said, “I have no idea whether she is ‘legally’ a member of my household.”

The governor has not yet quibbled about the meaning of “is,” but Friday’s evasions were almost Clintonian.

…

More at the link, of course. Aside from the clean energy thievery, prior to the election is came out that Kitzhaber’s live-in partner, Hayes, had previously married a man for money. He wanted citizenship; she wanted money. They never lived together and got a formal divorce after he received US citizenship. The Oregonian forgave that and endorsed Kitzhaber anyway.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted Wednesday he was not aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by RPG fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a false claim that has been repeated by the network for years.

Williams repeated the claim Friday during NBC’s coverage of a public tribute at a New York Rangers hockey game for a retired soldier that had provided ground security for the grounded helicopters, a game to which Williams accompanied him. In an interview with Stars and Stripes, he said he had misremembered the events and was sorry.

The admission came after crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment’s Chinook that was hit by two rockets and small arms fire told Stars and Stripes that the NBC anchor was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire. Williams arrived in the area about an hour later on another helicopter after the other three had made an emergency landing, the crew members said.

See what I mean? A simple mistake. Like thinking you had dinner at McDonalds on a certain date in 2003, when really it was Wendy’s. I bet you can relate.

“I would not have chosen to make this mistake,” Williams said. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.”

Williams made the claim while presenting NBC coverage of the tribute to the retired command sergeant major at the Rangers game, and the fans giving the soldier a standing ovation.

“The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG,” Williams said on the broadcast. “Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded and kept alive by an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry.”

Again, no big deal.

Williams and his camera crew were actually aboard a Chinook in a formation that was about an hour behind the three helicopters that came under fire, according to crew member interviews.

That Chinook took no fire and landed later beside the damaged helicopter due to an impending sandstorm from the Iraqi desert, according to Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Miller, who was the flight engineer on the aircraft that carried the journalists.

“No, we never came under direct enemy fire to the aircraft,” he said Wednesday.

Didn’t Hillary Clinton similarly lie about being fired upon… where was it? Bosnia or something. And we are supposed to believe anything that comes out of the mouth of any of these dolts? They lie to embellish their credentials. It is truly sad. Aren’t they famous and successful enough?

KORI SCHULMAN, WH OFFICE OF ONLINE ENGAGEMENT: You could consume the speech in real time on whitehouse.gov, with enhanced graphics and polls and tailored information to your particular city or town and really get a personalized and unique experience. On top of that, everything was shareable so as people were engaging in the speech, they could share videos, photos, favorite lines across their social channels, not to mention the fact that you could watch live gifs of the speech if you were on tumblr.

Gifs and tumblr? What editor missed those typos?

Whatever, I’m glad everything was “shareable”. Even if so few actually took part in the “giffing” and “tumbling”:

Television viewership for President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night fell to a 15-year low, according to numbers from Nielsen.

The 1-hour, 15-minute speech drew an average of 31.7 million viewers on broadcast and cable networks, the audience tracking firm said.

The combined figure is down about 5% from last year’s State of the Union address, which clocked in at 33.3 million viewers.

This year’s count, which does not include people who streamed the event online, was the lowest since President Clinton’s final State of the Union in 2000. That speech pulled in just under 31.5 million viewers.

Fox News Channel topped cable news ratings for the speech with about 3.5 million viewers.

Yet again, Fox News represents, while the rest of the racist media disses The Nation’s First African American President (TNFAAP).

But maybe all you young kids were streaming gifs on tumblr. Or tumbling streams on gifter. I would have preferred either to the live TV presentation. At least on the computer I can have Mature Madames open in another window. Who needs gifs when you can watch gilfs?

PARIS – Several people were taken hostage at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris on Friday after a shootout involving a man armed with two guns, a police source said. Two people were killed, according to police sources quoted by AFP.

There were unconfirmed local media reports that the man was the same as the one suspected of killing a policewoman in a southern suburb of Paris on Thursday.

A police source had told Reuters earlier he was a member of the same jihadist group as the two suspects in Wednesday’s attack at weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

The exact number of hostages was unclear. Local media spoke of at least five. The police source said the man was equipped with automatic weapons.

A CNN anchor claimed that Israeli propagandists are distorting the truth behind the terrorist attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and trying to sow anti-Muslim sentiment on Wednesday evening.

Repeatedly stating that it was his “Friday night” and he just wanted to relax, CNN anchor Jim Clancy argued on Twitter that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons did not actually mock the Islamic prophet Muhammad and claimed that those who disagreed with him were part of a pro-Israel propaganda campaign.

Clancy appears to have removed some of the more inflammatory tweets, but several still remain on his Twitter page. A spokesperson for CNN did not respond to request for comment.

“The cartoons NEVER mocked the Prophet,” wrote Clancy on Wednesday night. “They mocked how the COWARDS tried to distort his word.”

When this claim was disputed by some of his followers, Clancy suggested they were engaging in “hasbara,” an Israeli PR effort.

“Get a grip junior,” Clancy wrote to @HumanRights2K, a Belgium-based human rights news feed. “It’s my Friday night. You and the Hasbara team need to pick on some cripple at the edge of the herd.”

Clancy also tweeted “hasbara” in response to a comment from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Oren Kessler, and added, “The Hasbara (Israeli explaining the inconsistencies of Human Rights) team has declared victory over [me]. Next up, [International Criminal Court].” The second tweet appears to have been removed.

Clancy went on to accuse pro-Israel blogger Elder of Ziyon and a Twitter user called @JewsMakingNews of being “part of a campaign to do PR for Israel.” The tweet has also been removed.

Jews Making News is an anti-Semitic Twitter feed devoted to “exposing” alleged Jewish global domination and promoting Holocaust-denial. It is unclear why Clancy named either of the Twitter users as Israeli PR agents.

Clancy’s followers appeared baffled by his allegations, with one asking “Are you drunk right now or something?”

This was not the first time Clancy, who covers foreign affairs, made controversial comments related to Israel. He was criticized last April after he asked former Israeli ambassador Dore Gold whether Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu “personally order[ed]” airstrikes on Gaza as a response to a unity deal between Fatah and Hamas. Clancy also praised the deal as a way to bring “fresh blood” into the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

To get the extremely offensive tweets that are deleted in the above article, check out the Israeli media

I was gobsmacked this morning during drive time when I heard the NPR news report on the Islamist hostage situation in Sydney. The NPR reporter said, approximately, that there was a hostage situation in Sydney and that the Australian PM says it is probably political in motive. That’s all. Every other news source that I checked correctly noted that there was something resembling an ISIS flag in the window, being held up by the hostages. NPR tried to shield its listeners from the unpleasant fact that the Religion of Peace (or a minority thereof) was carrying out a terror attack in Sydney. What in the world does NPR have to gain by covering this up? And no matter what the answer is, why do I have to pay for it?

And here’s the latest, which you can share with your NPR-disabled friends:

Chilling images from Australian media on Monday showed people, believed to be hostages, with their hands pressed against the cafe’s windows. They were holding up a black flag with Arabic writing on it reading, “There is no God but God and Mohammed is the prophet of God.”

Sounds like angry Congregationalists to me. Again, why are we spending tax money on NPR? They couldn’t find the news if it was handed to them in a brown paper bag.

Last month, Rolling Stone published a story titled “A Rape on Campus” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie at a University of Virginia fraternity house; the university’s failure to respond to this alleged assault – and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual assaults. The story generated worldwide headlines and much soul-searching at UVA. University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and also to examine the way the school responds to sexual assault allegations.

Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone’s editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie’s credibility. Her friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported Jackie’s account. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. They responded that they couldn’t confirm or deny her story but had concerns about the evidence.

In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.

Will Dana
Managing Editor

That’s OK, Mr. Dana. This is just another example of journalists being journalists.

Whether it’s ISIS, Ebola, the border crisis, Putin’s aggression or the bad press generated by one of his golf outings, Obama is never ready when things go wrong.

This isn’t the first time Mad Magazine mocked Obama, something most major comic institutions either avoid or attempt with reservation. Earlier this year, the magazine took Obama to task for a prisoner swap involving five Taliban soldiers.

I haven’t read Mad for thirty years at least. But today I’ve never been more proud to have been a pimply adolescent male.

Who does Jonathan Gruber think is stupid – the Conservatives who never believed a word of ObamaCare nonsense or the NPR/NY Times/Boston Glob crowd who licked up every syllable and accused those who didn’t believe in it of racism? When he says that the American voter is stupid, he means them. Because the Limbaugh crowd and the Wall Street Journal crowd and the Libertarians and Fox News and the small business community and the Tea Party all knew that he, Obama, Reid and Pelosi lied about this every time they spoke. It was the Charlie Rose crowd, the Terry Gross crowd, the earnest little twits who gobbled this nonsense up with a spoon. No wonder the MSM isn’t covering any of this. It’s embarrassing.

Tom Magliozzi, half of the “Click and Clack” team of brothers who hosted NPR’s “Car Talk” radio show, died Monday. He was 77.

NPR reported the death Monday afternoon. The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, the radio network said.

In a statement, his brother Ray remembered a jovial partner.
“We can be happy he lived the life he wanted to live; goofing off a lot, talking to you guys every week, and primarily, laughing his ass off,” he said.

…

NPR has been airing archival material since the Magliozzis stopped making original shows two years ago. Berman told NPR that Ray would like the shows to continue as a tribute to his brother.

While all (or most) of the Democrat phonies are paying tribute to someone who essentially ran a party machine here (may he rest in peace)…

…someone who really spoke for the city (and sounded like it) passed. No disrespect to Mayor Menino, but my thoughts will be with another Italo-Bostonian tonight.

Our obsession with the Ottawa shooter’s religion reveals more about us than about him

I kid you not; that is the title of the piece. Why, oh why, should we concern ourselves with his faith?

Yesterday, the media reported that Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the man allegedly responsible for a horrifying shooting spree in and around the Canadian parliament, was a convert to Islam. News reports on the shooting then spent much of the day fixated on that unconfirmed fact — even though there is as yet no evidence that his religion was a motivation for his actions. More sensational coverage discussed dubious social-media connections to ISIS.

These reports imply that because Zehaf-Bibeau was Muslim, jihad is the likely motivation for his attack. But at this stage, without any actual evidence, it makes no more sense to come to that conclusion than it would to assume that he was motivated by Quebecois separatism, just because he was from Quebec. At this point, our focus on the Ottawa shooter’s religion says more about our own fears than it does about anything to do with Islamist terrorism.

On some level, of course, this feels like an obvious connection to make. ISIS dominates the news right now and we hear story after story of people from Western countries joining its jihadist campaign. Surely, it seems, Zehaf-Bibeau’s religion must be relevant to the terrible crimes he committed yesterday?

But those assumptions start to break down upon a little closer examination. Is the theory that the only reason a Muslim would kill is in the name of Jihad? Muslims are just like anyone else, for better or worse, which means that just as an act of generosity by a person who is Muslim does not mean that act was motivated by Islam, a murder committed by a Muslim was not necessarily driven by Islamist extremism.

And on it goes… The writer wishes to make herself (and the rest of us) as stupid as possible. This is just breathtaking stupidity. I don’t even have a way to categorize it or a decent simile. It isn’t like asking why we have to eat, or why the sky is blue, because those questions have interesting answers. Instead, it seems to be saying – screaming – LIKE ME BECAUSE I AM SO GOOD!!! What is wrong with this writer????